There won’t be much surprising for anyone familiar with “complexity science” but Philip Ball as usual is a very clear and clever writer, and this is worth reading or recommending to someone new to the ideas.

New to me was the inter-relationship of the social sciences and physics. Lately we’re used to applying concepts from physics to societies and considering it innovative — however statistical mechanics, entropy, heat, we’re all deeply influenced by statistical methods developed for census and social study (like average height in a population)